From other comment threads, I've come up with "A Modest Proposal" of my own, largely derived from Aldous Huxley. I can eliminate all contradiction of "meritocracy entrenching itself."
Meritocracies tend to lose their purity due to our propensity for passing on advantages to our friends and relatives. Over time, this yields something less like a meritocracy and more like aristocracy -- though it will perniciously continue to identify as a "meritocracy." Eventually, the contractions give rise to social upheaval. This is generally chaotic and bad, but the good news is that we can now have both the technology and social engineering know-how completely prevent this.
Simply engineer humans and human society such that the ruling classes really are smarter, fitter, and in every way superior to the lower classes. Relocate sources of fresh, nutritious food to big box stores in newly developed neighborhoods only accessible by car. Re-price food generally, such that once normal essentials like fresh produce are now luxury items. Furthermore, use subsidies to flood the market with empty calories in the form of synthetic starch, fat, and sugar, making it a concerted effort and additional expense over market norms to afford nutritious food conducive to intellectual development. (Not to mention subtle and complex gustatory stimulation.) In fact, make it economically advantageous in the short term for a household to buy food that makes its members sicker, fatter, and stupider. Use the media and market forces, such that companies are motivated by higher margins to aggressively market food -- both that of poorer quality to the less affluent and that of higher quality to the more affluent -- so that market forces directly reinforce the goals of the program, greatly leveraging (by orders of magnitude) the government subsidy of raw ingredients with private money.
While doing this, flood the media with trash, to cut off lower classes from excessive intellectual stimulation. Promulgate an ideology that attaches attractiveness and desirability with anti-intellectual attitudes, with the goal of raising the value of subconscious and tribal signaling over actual intellectual accomplishment. Close libraries, eliminating them as a source of unregulated intellectual stimulation. Also put additional pressure on the remaining libraries as locations for ad-hoc social work by eliminating funding for alternative places for underclass adults and children. Grant de-facto (but deniable) media monopolies to create market forces conducive to more trash content produced for the biggest audience at the lowest cost while discouraging the production of competing intellectually stimulating content. Certainly suppress, where it is possible to do so deniably, any media which is not subject to the above market forces. (Public radio and television, for example.)
Also recognize that such a program will succeed in suppressing a large proportion of the population, but additional measures will be needed to suppress the excess population of dangerous intellectually competent persons which will still crop up. Again, market forces can be leveraged with the aid of the right societal manipulations. Push a "nerd-culture" which is misunderstood by (and therefore isolated from) the mainstream, but which (outwardly) welcomes intellectuals. Manipulate this nerd culture, such that its population either largely discounts politics, or is attracted to fringe politics of no consequence. Also attach "coolness" in this segment of the populace with obsessive attention to technical and otherwise misunderstood esoteric pursuits which take up time and energy and act to distance this group from the mainstream. Realize also, that such persons are economically valuable, and further harness their economic potential by promulgating workaholic tendencies in the form of a "work hard, play hard" ideology. Create a norm of long hours, and provide on-site facilities to encourage this. Also promulgate the idea of "side projects" with the idea that the only worthy programmers are passionate enough to have such, and so create social pressures to dissipate yet more time and energy. Market forces can again be harnessed through the mechanism of a "startup scene" which keeps the youngest and most energetic intellectuals working long hours. Synergistic to such a scene and to the overall meritocratic ideology, also establish a nerd underclass sharing the same outward cultural trappings, but stuck in underpaid dead-end jobs or overpaid corporate dead-end jobs.
Note also that the promulgation of a nerd underclass means that many of the nerd/mainstream bifurcation strategies can also be applied within the nerd segment itself, further increasing the control of dangerous excess intelligence. Do this by also promulgating anti-intellectual attitudes within the nerd segment itself. Glorify the unquestioned parroting of memes from certain nodes on the Internet as indicators of cleverness and coolness. For whichever segment of the nerd populace that will buy it, place greater status to faster access to such memes over true skepticism and creativity. Also promulgate ideologies which elevate unquestioned ridicule as a kind of magical ultimate good, so long as it's funny, and which are easily applicable to suppressing complex and controversial topics through noise. Similar effects can be attained with the notion of the intellectual transcendence erroneously placed on a hazy notion of "irony," thereby causing susceptible persons to insulate themselves from reality and issues of social consequence in a bubble of their own smugness.
By throwing up so many dietary and socially engineered cultural barriers/traps working against actual personal development, the overall effect will be twofold. On one hand, the moneyed elites will have the resources to easily escape and side-step most of these traps, resulting in their population actually being largely superior, thereby placing the truth on their side. On the other hand, any individuals who manage to escape all of the above traps are likely to be superior individuals as well, making it easy for the existing elite to co-opt their talents, additionally bolstering the truth of the meritocratic ideology.
I think I have shown that the above scheme is not only extremely robust, but possesses other striking beneficial qualities, some of which may be unprecedented in human history. The scheme can be thought of as a disguised aristocracy which maintains the trappings of meritocracy through the use of numerous disguised and subliminal barriers to personal and intellectual advancement. Most uncontrolled intellectual and personal advancement is handily suppressed, and the remaining advancement is channeled in ways which produce considerable economic gain for the good of society as a whole. For the proportion of the population for which these barriers to personal advancement fail, absorption into the elite diffuses any potential for social upheaval while bolstering the power of the elite and its strength within its stated meritocratic ideology. In particular, this scheme has considerable advantages over a naive meritocracy, in that it successfully suppresses most social mobility while avoiding the ideological and actual contradictions that arise in following generations. By deliberately but deniably engineering the actual inferiority of the lower classes, ideological contradictions are eliminated. In this way, it's "the best of both worlds" -- achieving the social stability of aristocracy while avoiding its long term diffusion of talent and sustaining the ideological cover of "meritocracy" indefinitely. I hope the "merits" of such a system are self evident, and that such a system is adopted by our society in the near future.
(Addendum - This system is not without flaws. For one thing, it can be easily distinguished from a true meritocracy from its lack of social mobility. However, dissent resulting from this information can be readily suppressed by the same mechanisms outlined above.)